


A Very Long Summer: Epilogue III

by calathea



Series: A Very Long Summer [3]
Category: I Want To Go Home! - Korman
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-23
Updated: 2009-12-23
Packaged: 2017-10-05 01:44:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/36422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/calathea/pseuds/calathea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five things that hang on the wall of Rudy Miller's study.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Very Long Summer: Epilogue III

1\. _A green pennant, with the following text, slightly faded, printed in white: UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO TRIVIAL PURSUIT CHAMPION _

**One day, eight weeks since the last time Mike and Rudy had a moment alone together.**

"Seriously, Rudy," Mike said, twisting his fingers nervously around the cord for the blind in his window as he talked. "It's a _Trivial Pursuit_ championship. You _know_ I hate Trivial Pursuit. You _know_ my dad is obsessed with it and makes me play all the time at home. Why are you so desperate for me to enter? It would totally ruin my reputation if I end up the Trivial Pursuit champion of the university!"

"What reputation?" said Rudy, and Mike thought seriously about dropping his cell phone on the floor and stomping on it. "Mike, you know if you won this Trivial Pursuit championship, you would win a long weekend for two in a luxury hotel, right?"

"Yes, but Rudy..." said Mike, fidgeting with the blind cord again.

"A long weekend you could spend with your long-suffering boyfriend, who hasn't seen you in eight weeks except for that one time when you, in your infinite wisdom, brought my brother with you to Montreal," Rudy continued, ignoring the interruption.

"Yes, all right, I said I was sorry for that, but Rudy..." Mike said again, and yanked at the blind cord agitatedly.

"And really, how hard can a Trivial Pursuit competition be?" Rudy said, inexorably overriding Mike's comment.

"I don't know," Mike said, gloomily. "There's some fifteen year old math genius on campus this year, apparently he loves this kind of stuff."

"Hmmm," said Rudy thoughtfully.

"Oh no," said Mike, suddenly alarmed, "Don't start with the humming. You know it makes me nervous when you do that."

"I'm sure you can beat a fifteen year old," said Rudy, soothingly. "You're actually reasonably..."

Mike tugged again at the cord while Rudy was speaking, and then squawked and dropped the phone as the much-abused blind came adrift of wall and fell onto his head. "Ouch!"

"Mike? What happened? Are you all right?" Rudy was saying when he picked up the phone again, rubbing his head.

"Hi, I just dropped the phone. I pulled the blind in my window off the wall and it hit my head. What were you saying?" Mike explained, slightly breathless.

There was a long pause. "I was about to say that you were reasonably bright," said Rudy, a thread of amusement in his voice. "But now I'm rethinking that statement. What were you saying about your reputation, again?"

"I don't want to be in a Trivial Pursuit competition, Rudy," Mike said, and kicked petulantly at the fallen blind when Rudy said smoothly, inevitably: "Too bad. I already signed you up. Besides, I have a plan."

**Three weeks later.**

Mike felt so hot and sweaty and filled with loathing for Trivial Pursuit that as soon as the break was announced before the grand final of the competition, he went out the back door and into the alley behind the building to cool down.

His cell phone rang. Flipping it open, he looked at the caller display, and sighed. "Hello Rudy," he said resignedly, as he held the phone up to his ear. "I'm probably going to lose the last game. I'm up against the genius kid."

"I know," Rudy said, loudly, over the background noise wherever he was. "Where the hell did you run off to?"

"I was hot, I went out the back. Wait, what do you mean,_ you know_?"

"Where in the back?" Rudy said, distractedly "Excuse me. Pardon me. Never mind, I'll find you, just wait where you are while I get through these people."

"Rudy? What do you mean you'll find me? Rudy?" Mike was still talking into his phone when the door into the alley opened next to him, and Rudy appeared.

Mike boggled at him. "It wasn't enough that you phoned me every night for three weeks to ask me quiz questions for an hour," he said, disbelievingly, "You had to actually come _watch me_ have my ass handed to me in Trivial Pursuit by a four foot tall fifteen-year-old genius?"

Rudy took Mike's phone out of his hand, closed it, and pushed him gently back against the wall of the building. His hands slid around Mike's waist, and Mike felt him put the cell phone into his back pocket.

"I'm here to support you. I can only stay a few hours," Rudy said, his hands wandering a little. "And quiz hour got you to the final one-on-one contest, didn't it?"

"Yeah, but..." said Mike, then stopped on a sudden intake of breath as Rudy's hands found a sensitive patch of skin. "God, Rudy. Why are you _here_?"

Rudy pulled down the neck of Mike's t-shirt, and murmured something inaudible against his collarbone.

"What?" said Mike, pulling Rudy away from his skin.

"I said, I'm here because if you win," Rudy said calmly, leaning in so that he could speak close to Mike's right ear. "We can have a weekend together without my room-mates, or your room-mates, or Jeff, or, god forbid, either of our sets of parents, interrupting us. If you win, we can spend this evening deciding when we want to go to a nice hotel where we can do terrible, wonderful things together, in a really big bed, for forty-eight hours non-stop."

Mike closed his eyes and shivered, then turned his head to capture Rudy's lips in a messy, open-mouthed kiss. He was just letting his own hands wander when the back door slammed open next to them, and Rudy released his lips reluctantly. They turned to look at the new arrival in the alley.

The fifteen-year-old math prodigy stared at them, his eyes huge, and Mike quickly removed his hands from the more interesting parts of Rudy's anatomy and pulled at his t-shirt to straighten it.

A bell rang inside the building, and Mike's opponent vanished as suddenly as he had appeared. "That's your cue," said Rudy, and smoothed down Mike's t-shirt before shoving him through the door too.

Thirty-five minutes later, the disappointed audience of geeks and Trivial Pursuit fanatics was filing out of the auditorium, complaining that the last game must have been some kind of fix. Mike, stunned, met Rudy at the base of the stairs from the stage.

"He didn't get a single question right," Mike whispered, looking back up to where the defeated math genius was still staring at him with the same dazed expression he had worn throughout the entire game. "I think seeing us together traumatized him. I feel so guilty."

Rudy's lips quirked almost imperceptibly. "What was he going to do with a weekend for two in a fancy hotel, anyway?" he said, nonchalantly, retrieving the precious gift certificate envelope from Mike's nerveless grasp and putting it in his pocket, leaving Mike holding only the lame green pennant emblazoned with his new title. "Come on, let's get pizza."

Mike glanced back once more, catching the eye of his stunned-looking opponent again. Rudy slid his hand into the hollow of Mike's back and urged him out the door.

(Four weeks later, coming home exhausted and vaguely delirious from his terrible, wonderful weekend away with Rudy, Mike found his in-box crammed with love letters from the smitten child prodigy, which continued for weeks until Rudy, playing on Mike's computer one day when another impassioned e-mail arrived, took it upon himself to suggest that being arrested for stalking wasn't a great way for the junior genius start his academic career.)

_2\. A frame containing an Ontario license plate (license plate number: RUNNER) and a photograph of two young men, obviously related, leaning on a black sports car, the same license plate just visible on the rear bumper of the vehicle._

**One summer evening.**

"Best. Car. _Ever_," Jeffrey said, buffing an invisible spot off the immaculate shine of Rudy's new Corvette with his sleeve. "Rudy..."

Rudy raised an eyebrow at him. "No, you can't drive it. I saw what you did to Mom's car."

"That was _ages_ ago," whined Jeffrey, sliding covetously into the front seat of Rudy's car. "I'm a much better driver now."

Rudy leaned over the open door and looked down on his brother. "It was four months ago."

"But," said Jeffrey, pleadingly, "Just around the block?"

"You said you were doing evasive manoeuvres to avoid a squirrel," said Rudy, implacably. "You ran into a telephone pole and then, when you tried to reverse away from the pole, you ran into a mail box. Get out of my car."

Jeff pouted sullenly, and stroked the leather trim of the steering wheel. He was still trying to think of a way to convince Rudy to let him try out his new wheels when Mike arrived, pulling carefully into the Miller's long driveway in his own car.

Jeff rolled his eyes. "I can't believe Mike drives a Volvo."

Rudy looked at him repressively. "It's very safe."

Jeff laughed. "_You_ get to drive a sports car, but you think _Mike_ should only get to be 'safe'. That's fair!"

"Mike likes his car. It's just convenient for all concerned that I also like that he drives a Volvo," said Rudy, breaking off as Mike walked towards them.

Mike smiled at them both as he came up alongside Rudy, touching him gently at the waist to greet him, still shy about displays of affection in front of Rudy's family.

"Wow. Is this your new car?" Mike said, leaning in to look at the controls on the driver's side. "Wow. You have to love your sponsorship deal. I couldn't even afford to_ look_ at one of these."

Jeff grinned. "Will he let you drive it?" he asked, winking at Mike. "You can probably, uh, _ask_ more nicely than I can."

Mike just shrugged, and blushed pink.

"Mike!" called a woman's voice from the house, "Come in and have a cookie, dear, and tell me how your mother is getting on with her vegetable patch this summer."

"Hello Mrs. Mill...I mean, Liz!" said Mike, correcting himself when she frowned at him playfully. "My mom sent that recipe you wanted, and some of her strawberries."

With a slightly terrified look at Rudy, Mike jogged back to his car, retrieved a bag and walked up to the house. He emerged ten minutes later with Rudy's mother to find the brothers still admiring Rudy's new car. He was carrying a plate of cookies, while Mrs. Miller was holding her new digital camera.

"I want a picture of these two with Rudy's car," Mrs. Miller said, as they approached. "Would you mind taking it, dear? Or would you like to be in it?"

"Oh, uh, no. Not if it's a family shot," Mike said, hurriedly, exchanging his plate for the camera, and motioning for Rudy and Jeff to stand so he could get a good photo of them.

"You boys are going to the drive-in tonight?" Mrs. Miller said cheerfully, when the photo had been taken and approved using the small LCD display on the back of the camera. "Oh, that takes me back. Your father and I used to go to the drive-in. I love that they're making a come-back."

"You're going to have to shuffle the cars around," said Jeff to Rudy, scenting an opportunity. "I'll get yours, move it so you can get out." He reached out a hand for Rudy's keys.

"We're going in Mike's car," Rudy said, snatching his keys out of his brother's grasp and helping himself to another cookie.

Jeff looked at him, astonished. "You're going in _Mike's_ car? When you just had this one delivered yesterday? For God's sake, _why_?"

Mrs. Miller grinned widely, seeing Mike's face. "And how, Jeffrey," she said, with the edge of laughter in her voice, "Are they going to make out in Rudy's car? There's barely room to _move_ in there. They'd be bruised from head to foot before they kissed once!"

"Uh," said Mike, feeling the blush that invariably engulfed him when he was with the Miller family beginning to rise towards his hairline. "We... I..."

Jeffrey was choking on a cookie, and his mother helpfully smacked him hard between his shoulders.

Mike wondered if it was actually possible for a human being to spontaneously combust. He glanced over at Rudy to see him apparently stricken to silence, spots of colour high of his cheekbones, the half eaten cookie arrested on its path to his mouth. "Mrs. Mill... Liz," Mike began, mortified, seeing no help would come from that quarter.

Mrs. Miller turned her laughing glance on Mike. "Rudy comes by his love of sports cars from me," she said, with a wink, "But his father and I always took _his_ car to the drive in."

Silently, they all turned to look at Mr. Miller's sensible silver Volvo, parked close to the house.

Rudy coughed, and said in a strangled voice, "Mike, are you ready to go?"

"Yes, God, yes," Mike said, hurriedly, and turned to Mrs. Miller. "We'll uh, be back later."

Mrs. Miller smiled at him, her teeth gleaming. "Have fun, boys," she said, and reached out to hug Rudy and Mike in turn, and then walked back towards the house, whistling a little tune.

Jeffrey, shell-shocked, turned to Mike. "And that, Mike, goes to show that you_ are_ family."

_3\. A photograph of a lone man, running in a vast stadium, holding a Canadian flag in his hand. Behind him climb rows of seats, and flashes of light from unseen cameras appear as blurry pentagons, illuminating a heavy rain shower. His hair is plastered to his head, his expression exhausted.  
_

**The year that Rudy retired from competition.**

The last Olympics that Rudy Miller competed in were hosted in western Canada, with his own events held in the new Olympic stadium in what had become his hometown of Vancouver.

The three years prior to the Canadian Olympics were the hardest of his career, for both Rudy and Mike. Rudy was ten years older than many of the other competitors, and his collection of gold medals seemed to weigh him down rather than drive him forward. He injured his knee at the Commonwealth Games, recovered but won only two bronze medals in the World Championships. He qualified by the narrowest margin for a place on the Canadian team, and the press talked about nothing but whether Canada's Golden Boy should finally bow out to let a younger athlete to take part.

Rudy found himself exhausted by the punishing schedule of the Olympic athlete, by the five a.m. training sessions, by training camps a thousand miles from home and Mike, by the constant niggling injuries that Rudy just didn't bounce back from the way he used to. Mike, in the process of starting up his own clinic, did what he could to help, but found the two of them were being pulled more and more in opposite directions.

Four months before the Games started, Mike found Rudy asleep in his office, his face gaunt and pale with pain and fatigue, his knee wrapped up after yet another bad day on the track. He clicked the door shut, and Rudy woke up. They looked at one another across the expanse of Rudy's desk.

"Is it worth it?" Mike said, finally.

"To compete here, at home, in the Olympics," Rudy said, after another long silence, and his voice was tight with some emotion he couldn't express. "It's every athlete's dream. I would regret not doing it every day of my life, more than I would regret it if I came in last in every race.

"Then we'll do it," said Mike, grimly. "We'll do it together."

When Rudy walked into the Opening Ceremony, carrying the flag for Canada, the roar from the crowd was overwhelming. Every newspaper in Canada carried the photo the next day on the front page: Rudy Miller walking at the head of the Canadian team, his face as expressionless as ever, the stadium lights just picking out the first silver threads in his thick dark hair.

Rudy, who had never been a showman on the track, worked the crowd during his races for the first time in his career, asking for their support to carry his weary legs over the finish line. He won gold two days in a row, and the stadium rocked with his name, Canadian flags seeming to wave from every seat.

His last race was the final event on the penultimate day of the Games. Mike had no idea how Rudy was still moving, where he was finding the reserves of energy he needed to keep going.

Rudy crossed the line three inches ahead of the silver medallist, in a time far slower than his own world record pace, his feet bleeding in his running shoes. The storm that had threatened all day broke as he ran his final victory lap, a Canadian flag in his hand, and rain drenched the hysterical crowd, and trickled down Rudy's face from his soaking hair. The photograph taken of him by someone from the German press, running barefoot and silent in the rain, became one of the iconic images of the Vancouver Games.

They made it home, to their own bed, at five in the morning. Mike helped Rudy under the covers, and held him close while another storm raged. Rudy's arms were tight around Mike, his voice harsh as he said: "It's over, Mike, oh god, it's over, it's over."

Rudy was his usual inscrutable self once more at the ten o'clock press conference at which he announced his retirement from competition. Mike, smiling at him from the back of the room, blushed red when Rudy, asked what had carried him through the gruelling schedule of races he had just endured, answered simply: "My partner, Michael Webster."

_4\. A frame containing three photos: a young man and his bride, captured at the moment they leave the church; a solid young man and woman with hair dyed in stripes of black and white, in the midst of a large group of young children, obviously somewhere in Asia; two men, one blond, one dark, with a golden retriever, standing in front of a small suburban house, waving at the photographer._

**Andy and Emily**

Mike flopped down on the bed in their hotel room and sighed. "It's official. I'm old," he said, plaintively. "I never realized how old I am until today."

Rudy raised an eyebrow at him. "The fact that we nearly set the house on fire with all the candles on your birthday cake last year didn't alert you to it?"

Mike pulled a face at him. "You had just as many candles on yours."

Rudy nodded. "Yes, but my birthday, at least, was three months after yours." He paused, and then said, musingly, "Does that make me a toy boy?"

Mike snorted. "You wish."

Rudy allowed a small smile to tug at his lips, and then turned away to hang his jacket and Mike's in the small closet of the hotel room. "What prompted this sudden discovery that you're old, then?"

Mike sighed again, dramatically. "We just married off our eldest son."

"We did, yes," said Rudy, stripping off his dress shirt and stepping into the bathroom.

Mike reached over and picked up his camera, looking through the shots he had taken outside the church: Andy and Emily on the steps, laughing while the official photographer fussed around them; his three boys, arms around one another, identical grins on their faces; Liz Miller, alone now but still grinning wickedly, straightening Rudy's tie.

"I thought the part at the reception where everyone at our table tried to think of alternatives for 'Grandfather' for Andy's putative offspring to use, given the preponderance of men in the family group, was particularly special," Rudy was saying, and Mike put the camera on one side and watched as Rudy came back from the bathroom.

"I stand by what I said, I don't care what Emily's mother thinks. Andy's children can call us Mike and Rudy, just like the kids do," Mike said, mulishly and then paused, suddenly alarmed. "Oh God, I'm going to be a grandfather."

Rudy sat down next to him on the bed and bent to take off his socks. "Not immediately, unless there's something Andy isn't telling us."

"But I will be, one day," said Mike, clearly stricken, rolling on to his side and reaching out to grab Rudy's arm. "I don't want to be a grandfather. I'm not ready!"

Rudy tugged Mike's hand away, and unclipped Mike's cufflink from his sleeve. He reached out to put it on the nightstand next to the bed, and then turned back to Mike, who was fiddling with his other sleeve. In the mad rush of last minute wedding plans, Mike hadn't had time to have his hair cut and, now thickly salted with grey, it curled around his ears and at the nape of his neck.

Mike passed Rudy the second cufflink and started to unbutton his shirt. He looked up enquiringly at Rudy when he made a little humming noise of approval.

"You don't look like a grandfather right now," said Rudy, with a whisper of heat in his voice.

Mike flushed, grinned, and held out a hand to draw Rudy down to the bed beside him.

**David and Faith**

Mike, dragging himself back to the house after a series of late night emergencies one night in the middle of a stormy Vancouver winter, picked up the phone at midnight.

"Mike? It's Gabe."

"Gabe! Good grief, it has to be five years since I last heard your voice. How are you? You're up late, it has to be three in the morning where you are."

"We're fine, at least, I hope we're all fine. Listen, Mike, I'd love to catch up, but I have a bit of a situation, and I urgently need your help."

"Of course," Mike said, puzzled, and shrugged at Rudy, who had appeared beside him. "I'm putting you on speaker, so that Rudy can hear."

"Okay, hello Rudy."

"What can we do for you, Gabe?" Rudy said, his voice smooth and calm. Gabe, who was starting to sound a little frayed at the edges, sighed in unconscious relief.

"It's my niece, my brother Luc's daughter," Gabe said. "She's just arrived back from Vietnam and she was stopped in immigration, some problem with her passport, and missed her connection. She's been stranded by the storm, and she's been told it could be a couple more days before she'll get a seat on a plane. The hotels in the city are all full, and we don't have any family out on the west coast. It was a terrible flight, apparently, and she's exhausted and I don't think she's very well." He paused to take a breath, and then continued, his anxiety clear in his voice: "She sounded frightened on the phone, something about some guy hassling her when she was trying to sleep in the departure lounge. Could you help? Find her a safe place to stay for twenty-four hours?"

"She can stay with us," Mike said, instantly, and Rudy nodded to him across the table.

Gabe sighed again. "Oh, I'm so relieved to hear you say that," he said, "You guys were my last hope."

Rudy had pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and was already speaking quietly into it. "We're going to send David to collect her," Mike said, catching Rudy's eye, "He's closer to the airport, and he can bring her back here. Can you call her? Tell her to go wait for him in the arrivals area? Oh, what's her name?"

"Faith," said Gabe, "Her name is Faith."

Faith, pale green with exhaustion and what Mike diagnosed as dehydration and a touch of food poisoning, turned out to be a tiny, beautiful girl, with hair dyed five different shades of blue and a personality ten times her physical size. She had evidently fought with David about the role of NGOs in developing countries all the way from Vancouver airport to the house, despite having to make him stop the car twice so she could throw up. David, flummoxed, helped her up the stairs to Andy's old room with a peculiar mixture of fascination and terror on his face.

For three days, while the storms blew themselves out in Vancouver and Faith recovered from her illness with cheerful resilience, Mike and Rudy watched the two of them argue about everything from the effectiveness of democratic forms of government to the design of modern homes. It was apparently the latter that resulted in David, who had just started his internship in architecture, slamming out of the house at seven on a Sunday morning.

"Oh God," said Mike, his voice muffled by the pillow he'd pulled over his face. "I can't believe I'm saying this about my own son, but I wish they'd just have sex and get it over with already."

Rudy, face down in the bed, grunted in agreement.

Downstairs, the door slammed again, followed by a raised voices and, abruptly, silence.

"D'you think they've killed each other?" said Mike, sitting up, after the silence had gone on for some minutes.

Rudy sighed, and rolled over. "No, I think they're getting it over with."

Mike blinked at him. "In the kitchen? But now I'm awake I'm hungry!"

Rudy pulled him back down to the bed. "I'm sure I can distract you for an hour."

Faith and David's relationship was a stormy, on-and-off soap opera for the next four years, which Mike and Rudy watched with astonishment and inscrutable calm, respectively. They eventually announced their marriage in a sheepish email from Cambodia, attaching a picture of them together in front of the school they were building for Habitat for Humanity. Mike just blinked and laughed, surprised by nothing those two did by that point.

**Xav and Daniel**

Mike put the last box down in the living room with a thump, and then straightened up with a groan. He looked around at the piles of boxes and furniture shoved haphazardly against the walls. "Now I remember why Rudy and I have lived in the same house for so long," he said, "I hate carrying boxes around."

Daniel smiled at him, and held out a cup of coffee. "Rudy said you would need this."

Mike grabbed for it and took a blissful gulp. He sighed. "I'll say this for Rudy, he may excel at slithering out of anything that resembles hard work, but he makes a good cup of coffee."

Laughing, Daniel agreed. "He said I should tell you he's been supervising. He found the cookies, too, come have a few."

"Oh yes, supervising," Mike said, rolling his eyes as they strolled towards the kitchen, "I know what _that _means!"

He was still grinning when he pushed the door open into the kitchen, to find Xavier hugged tightly in Rudy's arms, his head pressed into Rudy's shoulder. Rudy shook his head warningly at them when Daniel stepped forward impulsively, looking distressed. Rudy stroked his hand over Xav's hair. Daniel's dog, Emma, was watching them, her tail twitching uncertainly.

After a moment, Xav stirred in Rudy's arms, and Rudy let him go. "All right?" he said, softly, and Xav gave him a watery smile, and bent down to pet the worried dog.

"So," said Mike, in a normal tone of voice, "Do you guys want us to help move furniture, or should we leave you in peace to start getting sorted out?"

They stayed another half hour, moving some of the larger pieces of furniture around. Finally, Xav said he thought he and Daniel could do the rest, and Mike and Rudy got ready to leave.

"Can you do something for us?" said Daniel, as they were packing some odds and ends into the back of Mike's car. "We'd like a photo of us in front of the house."

He and Xav held hands and waved in front of their first real home together, the dog bouncing around and barking while Mike tried to work Daniel's ridiculously complicated camera.

He waved goodbye through the car window, trying not to notice how tightly Xav was holding Daniel's hand as they left. It was only a ten minute drive to their own home.

"Just think," said Rudy, urbanely, as they went through the front door. "We can have sex on the floor of any room we want again, without worrying that one of the kids will walk in."

Mike laughed. "Let's avoid the kitchen," he said, "Tiling, you know, very cold. Hard on the knees too."

He stretched, trying to work the kinks out of his back. "I'm going to take a shower, I'm sweaty from heaving boxes around."

"I'll come help," said Rudy, raising an eyebrow, making Mike grin, "I'll just put this stuff away."

He left, carrying a small box, and Mike wandered up the stairs towards their bedroom. On the landing, he stood and looked at the family photos on the walls there, running a finger nostalgically over one or two.

"I thought you were taking a shower?" Rudy asked, coming up behind him silently.

Mike said nothing, just traced a finger along the frame of a photo of the five of them. After a moment, Rudy slipped his hands around Mike's waist, and turned him into his arms. Mike leaned against him, settling with the ease of long habit against Rudy's body.

"I miss them," he said, finally, "I miss having everyone home."

After a minute he sighed, and rubbed his forehead against Rudy's shoulder. "What happened in the kitchen with Xav?"

Rudy shrugged, a tiny movement under Mike's hands. "I think he just felt overwhelmed for a minute."

Mike nodded. "Poor Rudy," he said, leaning back to look into Rudy's eyes, "Everyone's clinging to you today."

Rudy's hand guided Mike's head back down to his shoulder. "I don't mind," he said, softly, and held Mike closer for a second. "Though I could wish that you had showered first," he said, in quite a different tone, and Mike started to laugh.

_5\. An oil painting of a male nude. The model is lying on his side, facing away from the artist, stretched out on rumpled white and blue sheets. His head, topped with ruffled brown hair, lies on top of his outstretched arm. The portrait is signed S. D. _

**In a bar in Montreal, at the end of a long summer.**

"No way," Mike said, loudly, slamming his empty glass on the table. "No way. There isn't enough alcohol in Canada to make me drunk enough to agree to be painted in the nude."

"Please?" Sam said, stretching out the vowel sound. "Pretty please? I wouldn't normally ask, but I need another two canvases finished before I go back to school, and believe me, I'm scraping the bottom of the model barrel here."

Mike glared at him. "You're not helping yourself here, Sam."

Sam just laughed, and turned to thank Bob as he wordlessly handed Sam another drink over his shoulder, then moved around the table to sit next to him. Rudy, carrying two glasses, sat down next to Mike, raising an eyebrow slightly at Mike's expression.

"He won't pose for me," said Sam, mournfully, sipping his drink. "He says there isn't enough alcohol in Canada to make him do it."

Rudy's eyebrow rose a little higher. "There's probably enough alcohol in this glass, actually," he said, confidingly, ducking as Mike flung out a hand to smack him in the arm and then handing Mike the drink. "He's a cheap drunk."

"Am not," mumbled Mike, nose in his glass.

Rudy just looked at him, then coughed. "Did Mike tell you about the time we went to a bar and he almost ended up in a strip tease competition?" he asked, looking at Sam and Bob, and dodging Mike's attempts to silence him. "He was half way out of his shirt before I could make it across the room to him. I think he'd had one bottle of Molson's at that point."

"Rudy!" Mike yelped, finally managing to slap a muffling hand over Rudy's lips. Sam and Bob cackled with laughter on the other side of the table as the two of them scuffled with one another, almost knocking over Rudy's drink.

"Careful," said Bob, moving it out of the way.

Mike stopped, and Rudy caught the hand over his mouth, kissed the palm, and gave it back to Mike, who blushed and became very interested in his glass again.

"Hmm," said Sam, thoughtfully. Mike looked up. "I'd like to try painting from sketches and photos," Sam said, after a moment, "I could do a study of the two of you, together, with maybe two, three hours of camera and sketch time. Though of course I already have a lot of sketches of the two of you."

Mike's jaw dropped.

"Nude, of course," Sam continued, musing aloud. "Yes, that would actually be very interesting. I can just imagine it. In bed, I think, lots of white and blue. Action shots, so to speak."

Mike blanched, and even Rudy was visibly taken aback. "There isn't enough alcohol in the _world_ for me to agree to that," said Mike, firmly, "In fact, there hasn't been enough alcohol in the _history of the world_ for me to agree to you taking photos while Rudy and I have sex."

Bob laughed, and Rudy made some remark about Sam's perversions, and the conversation moved on to less dangerous topics.

**Many years later.**

Behind him, Andy could hear the babble of his family's voices, gently muted in deference to the sleeping infant in their midst. It was the first day Emily had felt up to a large family gathering after her difficult time in labour and the first few insane weeks with the baby. He and Emily knew no-one minded that they had stayed away from the normal Sunday family get-together, the same way he had known that Mike would come over at three in the morning when he called, worried about the little cough the baby had developed, and that Xav would clear the snow off his driveway every morning so that he could spend that precious extra few minutes with Emily and his son before he went to work. That was just how family worked. It was why they had moved back to Vancouver when they had had the chance.

Sunday was always relaxed. Emily was holding court with baby Adam in the living room, Xav had wandered off to take the dog for a quick walk, and Rudy was apparently overseeing lunch preparations in the kitchen.

Andy took a deep breath. "I need a lawyer," he said, leaning against the door of Rudy's office, "I want to make a will."

Mike, reading a medical journal in the armchair in the window, looked up. "The guy Rudy and I go to is good," he suggested, smiling, "Or, I know Margaret, at the clinic, her son is a lawyer, if you'd rather go somewhere else."

Andy shrugged. "Your guy will be fine."

Mike stood up, and went to look in Rudy's desk. "I'm sure Rudy has his card," he said, rifling through one of the drawers.

"I want to make sure," Andy stopped abruptly, and then cleared his throat and started again. "I want to make sure Adam is taken care of. My father didn't leave a will, and well, you know the chaos that caused."

Mike stopped paging through a pile of business cards, and looked at him seriously. "I know. It's very sensible of you to think of it."

There was a long pause. "He'd be very proud of you, you know," Mike's soft voice continued, "And that you gave his name to your son."

Andy stared at the painting on the wall opposite, blinking hard and willing away the dampness in his eyes. Then he looked more closely at the picture, his eyes widening.

The painting had hung in this room since he and his brothers had come to live there. He remembered it because this was the room they had used whenever anyone official had come over from Social Services, and later, from the adoption service. Mike and Rudy had had a whispered argument about it before the very first of those meetings, an argument that they hadn't intended Andy to hear.

"They'll think we're perverts!" Mike had hissed, "Can't you move it downstairs?"

Rudy's bland expression had not changed. "I don't think an original by one of Canada's most famous young artists should be called perverted." He'd paused, then gone on, "Frankly, if us owning a perfectly innocent oil-painting of a male nude is a problem, we haven't got much hope at all, under the circumstances."

Mike had muttered something that sounded like "Innocent, my ass" and then the doorbell had rung and everyone had been on his best behaviour for the caseworker.

Andy had looked at the portrait while the lady from social services interviewed his brothers, and couldn't see what was perverted about it. He hadn't known why Rudy would _want _a picture of some guy's butt on his wall, but, after only a few weeks sharing a house with Rudy, he had decided he might never know why Rudy did any of the things he did.

Now, though, looking at it properly for the first time in a couple of decades, Andy thought he might have an inkling of why Rudy had it hung on his wall. The model's smooth skin was marked on one shoulder by a constellation of three large freckles, in a sort of lopsided triangle shape. It was something Andy had seen a thousand times, at the pool, on the beach, in the back yard during the summer, any time his adoptive father took his shirt off.

"That's _you_," he said, incredulously, gazing open-mouthed at Mike, suddenly recognising him in the slim-hipped young man sprawled on the bed, dark hair ruffled as if someone had been running his fingers through it.

"What's him?" said Rudy, appearing from nowhere to stand behind Andy.

"The _painting_," said Andy, "That's _Mike_."

"What's Mike?" said David, interestedly, from the hallway. Faith craned over his shoulder to get a look at what was going on.

"The _painting_," Andy said again.

"You've only just realized?" Xav said, pushing past Andy and Rudy and going over to look at it up close. "I knew years ago. The freckles, you know? But then maybe I was just more interested in looking at naked men than you," he finished, turning to grin back at Andy.

"It's a Sam Davenport original, I think." Emily said, jiggling the baby in her arms and looking from the portrait to Mike and back again a few times. "I never even noticed it before. It's one of his early works, isn't it?"

"It was a favour for a friend," Rudy was saying to Daniel. "Mike wouldn't pose facing the artist, even after four beers and a whiskey chaser."

In the midst of the chatter, Mike, his face purple with embarrassment, suddenly made eye contact with Andy, and started to laugh. Infectious as always, his laughter spread to the whole room, until even the baby gurgled and waved one little fist.

When everyone had quieted a little, Mike nudged Rudy, who had moved to stand beside him. "Rudy," he said, with a wicked glint in his eye, "You should tell them what happened to the _other_ painting Sam did, the one _you're_ in."

**THE END**


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